Understanding “time waiting for specialist/admitting doctor opinion”

Some patients in the emergency department require input/opinion from a specialist doctor. For example, a patient experiencing chest pain may need to be seen by a heart specialist. In addition, since emergency doctors do not formally admit patients to the hospital, they contact an admitting doctor or specialist to admit patients who need to receive hospital care.

Currently, in the HQCA’s “medium urban” peer grouping, Sturgeon Community Hospital in St. Albert is the only hospital that has consistent data available for this report.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess the emergency department’s performance in these dimensions of quality: